1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to information presenting apparatuses, particularly to an information presenting apparatus that displays a screen and outputs a sound in combination.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, small portable terminals having displays, such as PDAs or cellular phones, are becoming common. These terminals are so small that only limited amounts of information can be displayed on screens. When an attempt is made to display an amount of information exceeding the limits, characters could be too small to be legible.
When layout of information contributes to legibility, as in the case of newspapers or catalogs, it is important to display the information while maintaining the layout. However, when an attempt is made to display a range of article of a size that is only recognizable in terms of layout structure in a small screen, the sizes of characters displayed become too small so that only headers or the like are legible.
It is possible to change the display scaling factor as needed so that characters in a part of interest are sized suitably for reading. However, since the overall layout structure cannot be recognized in an enlarged state, operations for changing the scaling factor or the display position tend to occur frequently, which is laborious for users.
Furthermore, when the document is not originally intended for display on a small screen, if wrapping is not carried out in the screen, lines of text are each displayed only partially. Thus, it is not allowed to view the entire series of text and the text becomes only a collection of small segments. This degrades the ease of understanding.
Similar problems could occur for musical scores as well as texts.
An approach that can be taken when it is not possible to read the content under the current display state is to listen to the content by speech instead of reading information on the display screen.
According to techniques disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2001-209645, in displaying a document accumulated in a filing system, when coordinates on an original image displayed is specified, text in a text area associated with the coordinates specified is read aloud. This is presumed to be used when it is not allowed to recognize some text due to the resolution of a display apparatus, and an arbitrary text area can be specified.
Problems of the information presenting apparatus according to the related art will be described with reference to FIGS. 1 and 2.
FIG. 1 is a schematic block diagram showing the construction of the information presenting apparatus according to the related art. FIG. 2 is a flowchart of an operation executed by the information presenting apparatus according to the related art.
A document inputting unit 2 extracts document information 54 from a document 52 including text (S2), and a layout analyzer 4 extracts data 56 including text blocks and position information of the respective text blocks in the document information (S4). Then, a display data extractor 6 extracts display data 58 for one screen (S6), and a document display unit 10 displays corresponding information (S10).
When read-aloud-target text is specified by a read-aloud-target specification acceptor 20 (i.e., when step S20 results in YES), a conversion-target extractor 14 extracts read-aloud-target text data 68 (S22), and a speech outputting unit 16 converts the read-aloud-target text data 68 into speech and outputs the speech (S16).
When a change in the display position or a change in the display scaling factor is instructed by a display-position and display-scaling-factor changer 18 (i.e., when step S18 results in YES), the display data extractor 6 changes the display position or the display scaling factor according to the instruction (S6).
According to the related art, a user specifies text of interest using the read-aloud-target specification acceptor 20 from text in a document displayed on the screen to have the text read aloud.
A device that allows direct specification, such as a mouse, is provided as the read-aloud-target specification acceptor, in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2001-209645.